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Apache Commons updates Configuration and Validator

The Apache Commons developers have updated two of their projects: Commons Configuration 1.8 and Validator 1.4. Both Apache 2 licensed projects take on common tasks that Java developers can find mundane work.

Validator, designed to simplify the validation of email addresses, URLs, currency, dates, ISBN and IBAN numbers and more, hasn't seen a new release since 2006's 1.3.1. The update adds a new generic code validator and a regular expression validator and resolves a number of bugs; these include checkstyle issues and correcting validation of gmail addresses, domains with special characters and @localhost email addresses, and URLs with top level domains with more than four characters in them. Other changes are listed in the release notes; Commons Validator 1.4.0 binaries and source can be obtained from the project's download page.

Configuration addresses the process of reading configuration files for applications and offers a generic way to read that information from plain text files, XML documents or JDBC data sources. Configuration has been more regularly maintained than Validator and version 1.8 finally brings support for Java 1.5 and makes it the minimum required version of Java. Other changes include the project now using the standard Maven layout, supporting binary literals in config data, better documentation for file based configuration and an update of the Commons Jexl dependency. The updated Commons Configuration is available to download as binary or source files from the project's download page.